It is not unusual for television programs, movies, and/or other scheduled, stored, and/or on-demand content to include commercial advertising at one or more locations within the content. It is also not unusual for a user viewing the content to desire skipping the commercials. Traditionally, this has been done by initiating manual fast-forward or skip-forward commands (for skipping forward by a pre-set amount of time in the content) at the appropriate times. However, this is not always convenient to the user.
Moreover, where the content is being streamed to the user over a network resource, such fast-forward and skip-forward commands often invoke sending trick-play files (e.g., fast-forward trick-play files) over the network. Because such trick-play files typically contain little or no repetitive content data between video frames, such trick-play files may not be as highly compressible as the main content. Therefore, it may be expected that the trick-play files, and in turn the acts of skipping commercials, consume a relatively large amount of network bandwidth.
Solutions have been provided in which a user can tag content with a particular time stamp during an initial viewing of the content. Upon subsequent viewings, the user can issue a command to jump to the particular time stamp location within the content. However, this is of little value for content that has not yet been viewed by the user. Nor is this convenient where there are multiple instances of commercials scattered throughout the content.